D & N
D & N 2 CD-r
December 15, 2010
By Tim Gentles
“D & N 2” is most striking at first glance for its packaging. Wrapped in some kind of “mysterious sebaceous animal fleece,” I frankly avoided having anything to do with this disc so as not to have to come into contact with the thick, wet smell of sheep’s (?)wool.
It’s a pity I left the CD and its animal fleece stewing on my shelf for such a long time, though, as this full-length debut of the collaboration between Nevada Hill and David Lee Price, both of Zanzibar Snails, is delightfully, ahem, earthy.
A rustic, outdoorsy vibe prevails throughout the disc. The sound is very dense and multilayered, a quality that presumably owes something to its mixing method, in which after it was recorded and mixed the first time, the mix was cut in half and the two halves were placed on top of each other. As a result the disc is never without a busy moment, but never without a dull one either. This is improvisational stuff very much in the vein of other woodsy experimenters such as No-Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand of the Man. A variety of unsettling, fractured sources of percussion come and go, as do mournful and quite beautiful melodica drones and some acoustic guitar. All of which is softly undergirded, a lot of the time literally but definitely spiritually, by the lonely sound of rain falling on a tin roof – perfectly evoking the North Texas landscape where it was recorded.
They got a 9/10 from Foxy Digitalis, and this is very good, so why not.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment